Once Upon a Time in America

Who does this guy Sergio Leone think he is imposing his spaghetti western sensibilities on the American gangster mythos? The movie--all 3 and 3/4 hours of it (that's right, three and three quarters hours)--unrolls like a carpet... no high points and no low points, it just goes on. I admit that it kept me watching, mainly in the hope that a scene would finally develop some dramatic impact, but none ever did. The picture sets up a whole bunch of weighty themes-friendship, loyalty, honor, fate--and then just seems to abandon them. Leone takes the usually infallible device of watching a group of hoodlum kids grow up to become powerful gangsters, and trashes even that. Most of the kids are poor actors saddled with a bad script, the kind of script that thinks it's following archetypes when really it just makes the kids look embarrassed when they have to deliver their occasional dirty lines (which seem, somehow, anachronistic). The actors who play the grown-up gangsters are just lost in the morass, even Robert DeNiro (who I was never as wild about as everybody else) and James Woods (who I was). To top it all off, even the story lihe is a disaster, all jumbled up. What a mish-mosh... a big mish-mosh. The picture ends with one of the oldest tricks in the book (which we all see coming) and even with that cheap device can't make everything clear. One effect this picture has is to make the late TV series "The Gangster Chronicles" seem like a masterpiece. Another effect was probably easing unemployment in Italy. All six (count 'em) screenwriters were Italian, as was most everybody who worked on the film. Remember how I said in the Scarface Manifesto that after “The Godfather” and “Scarface” no more gangster pictures were really needed? I was right.